Queens · Queens County
Queensboro Bridge Park
NYC Parks
- Location
- Bridge Plaza South at Queens Boulevard, Long Island City
- Size
- 1.5 acres
- Hours
- 6 AM - 1 AM daily
- Type
- NYC Parks
Queensboro Bridge Park is a small park at the Queens landing of the Queensboro Bridge in Long Island City, providing green space beneath one of New York's most iconic bridges.
The Queensboro Bridge (officially the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge), completed in 1909, connects the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Long Island City in Queens. Its main cantilever span was the longest in North America when it opened, second worldwide only to Scotland's Forth Bridge, until the Quebec Bridge surpassed it in 1917.
Long Island City has been transformed from an industrial neighborhood into one of the fastest-growing residential and cultural districts in New York City, with luxury residential towers, the MoMA PS1 contemporary art museum, and the Noguchi Museum.
The bridge was immortalized in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, when the city rises before Gatsby and Nick Carraway as they cross into Manhattan. The bridge continues to provide one of the most dramatic approaches to Manhattan.
Queensboro Bridge Park provides a small green respite at the Queens end of one of literature's most celebrated bridges, in a neighborhood that is experiencing its own Gatsby-like transformation.